This is an author interview by Fernando G Herrero, author of The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect.
What was the assembling idea behind this work?
I was in the middle of the PhD at Duke University in the late-1990s after Wake Forest University, the University of Wales, Swansea and the University of Salamanca where I completed the BA and MA in English and Spanish. At Duke, I benefitted from a great effervescence. Things were happening in the humanities, questions were being asked right, left and centre. I took courses with Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Alberto Moreiras and Ariel Dorfman. Walter Mignolo’s influence was in the air. I thought this was the most intellectually stimulating option. Duke was a dynamic, international hub. Enrique Dussel visited one semester. I had read his work and I made the most of the proximity. We talked for hours. I used old cassette tapes to record those conversations. The good result came out two years later in Boundary 2. This is the origin of The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations. I liked the intense experience very much. After I joined Stanford University, I decided to break free from a relative isolation I felt in the West Coast, and I picked up on the conversational model. Using the funds I had available at that time, I reached out to five figures (Walter Mignolo, José Rabasa, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno and Roberto González Echevarría). I had read a lot of their work ever since graduate school. Now I wanted to continue the explorations around a series of preoccupations. I wanted to do so in this plural or choral fashion. The themes had – and have – to do with the foreign humanities particularly in the Spanish–English dyad or binary, both terms understood expansively in (inter-)national, political, historical and cultural terms. I looked – and I still do – at the avatars, good and bad, informing university life and I followed through the latest developments of academic cultures of historical scholarship in a variety of nations. I was back then an immigrant scholar, and I still remain one today with all the virtues and vices, travels, troubles, precarities and ‘glories’ that inform such self-definition. Hence, I was looking at the United States after Duke with mixed feelings. I contacted these five scholars. I requested their latest output. I read the stuff. I gathered my thoughts. I took notes. I travelled to where they were. I wrote a script that I made available beforehand if they so wanted. I conducted the interviews and I taped them in the old cassette tape format. I transcribed, translated, edited, etc. These tapes went back and forth over a vast geography in the last few years. They nearly got lost a couple of times. The spoken word was typed, and transcripts were edited and digitalised. They saw the light of day gradually, sometimes partially. The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations is the final product that responds to this original intent. It has taken a fair amount of time and dedication. A few others have been interviewed since.
Why should the readers care about The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations? Give us the main attractions.
This work is looking for a few good readers who will be curious about how people try to make a living in the humanities in the entrails of the superpower in moments of relative decline (I am writing these lines in the January days surrounding the inauguration of the second Trump presidency). So, if you want to know more about Uncle Sam in the cultural realms, this book will illuminate some events and practices since the 1980s. The United States is our ‘ground zero’ and the brave readers will travel ‘there’. Some findings will surprise them. If these good readers also care about the entanglements between English and Spanish, the two most numerous languages in the West, this work will give plenty of disquieting information about that (other languages are also included and the institutionality of ‘the languages’ is also included, explicitly). There are also many comments about the larger international context of politics, the diverse developments of the different schools of thought of literary and cultural criticism in the United States and beyond in the last three to four decades, and we have the individual trajectories of five scholars in the main stage arena (Adorno, Beverley, González Echevarría, Mignolo and Rabasa). These five figures have specific trajectories and have left their fingerprints in significant texts of reference for the following generations. So, interest should multiply by five. Those who care first and foremost about literature and culture should read this book. Those who do not care about literature and culture should also read this book to see how (subaltern) knowledge still manages against all odds to say a few things of general value to the world at large and to the other disciplines too. The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations makes claims for internationalism, interdisciplinary, anti-nationalistic methodologies, perspectivism, situated-knowledge practices and the value of the humanities. Our five interlocutors bring a rich universe of other authors, critics, landscapes of vision, memories, desires, challenges and even frustrations. There are agreements and disagreements, and there will be great fun to see who says what about whom, etc. The reader will have to pick the most persuasive answers to big issues and problems. Language is alive and kicking. There is humour too.
Please highlight some good moments in these five conversations with these five protagonists (Adorno, Beverley, Gonzalez Echevarria, Mignolo, Rabasa).
The readers will put together five examples of a personal biography and a significant body of scholarship oftentimes under duress in the high-visibility and high-pressure context of the United States. Consciousness combines with circumstance and we are here dealing with ‘dislocations’. I refer to ‘double consciousness’ and mise en abyme. We can also imagine a broken or an incomplete mirror for a self-consciousness to (re-)consider what is going on where, when, how, why, who/whom, etc. There is also the immigrant condition of knowledge production that must (re-)negotiate its new settings. There are degrees of dislocation and intensity, immigration and foreignness, accommodation and revolt among our participants.
About Adorno, one must admire the dedication to the writing of the chronicles of ‘Indies’ (the America before the existence of the nations as we know them today) in particular in relation to the historical figure of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in colonial Peru. An awful lot of issues come up apropos Eurocentric conceptions. The call for ‘decolonization’ remains for the brave not only in the ‘home of the brave’.
About Beverley, I still like the ‘hopscotch’ quality of America in the 1960s and the fateful encounter with Hispanic and Latin American studies, the latter forcefully pulling away the bull by the tail in the end to this day. There is a vividness to the moment of postmodernism (1980s) and the emergence of what would be called the Third World and the competing arrangements for the disciplines in the Area Studies of Empire. Luis de Góngora (the fascination or fetish of Baroque aesthetics), testimonio in the context of the ‘troubles’ in Reagan’s Central America, the institutional self-critique of literary studies (the ‘against literature’ stance), the pushing for subaltern studies, the final ‘failure’ of Latin America to signify a radical difference vis-à-vis the United States as we move from Reagan to Trump.
The contrast is sharp with González Echevarría who playfully magnifies his own singularity repudiating all external influences and role models after the pleasures of literature. There is some ‘theatre’ here with or without his own collaborations with post-structuralism, anthropology, legal studies, deconstruction, Foucaultianism, etc. There is a strong Cuban self-affirmation within U.S. dynamics, expansively understood as maximising Latin American visibility and general Hispanophone projections on both sides of the Atlantic. This foundational father offers sincere feeling and complete dedication. Yet times stop for no one. An awful lot has happened in the last three to four decades.
Mignolo brings what I would call ‘decolonial discontent’ to the discussion table. Such is a healthy reminder to the insistence of some on an exclusive (early) Modernity that comes and goes in predictable ways. The rubric underlines the (im-)possible non-Eurocentric or non-Western modalities of knowledge and affect in the past and the willed projection, ‘post-’ or ‘de-’ colonial if you wish, of something different in a foreseeable future (would we dare say that we are moving from the colonial to the BRICS as a parallel to PLATO and NATO?). The march runs along the shadows of any singular modernity deemed victorious or hegemonic in a chronology that must ‘go back’ to the sixteenth century as soon as you bring the Hispanic or Latin markers inside the West, but the big category needs vigorous interrogation. It is important to understand the context of poststructuralism and post-foundationalism in which such ‘dissident’ impulse gathers momentum, adding the Foucaultian critique of power/knowledge, with its hegemonic narratives of ‘history’, and the vindication of Latin American ways of articulating theoretical ‘difference’. Other genealogies are mentioned in the conversation with me. There is also an approximation to Latino communities among other groups conventionally deemed ‘minorities’ in the United States as potential allies.
About Rabasa, I would like to underline the scepticism towards all national formations giving birth to institutions and disciplines, even his ‘atheism’ towards official discourses of declared belief systems. There is something of a contemplation of the abyss of the ‘non-thetic’, as though language failed us. There is a desire to ‘get out of these’. Yet how? ‘Colonial’ is thus something like a permanent marker of constitutive ‘violence’ that reaches us today. The difference with ‘postcolonial’, unclear. We do not leave ‘it’ behind. ‘It’ does not leave us behind like a persistent bad lover who is still inside who we (say we) are. The inspiration is, for him, a differentialist and potentially rebellious Indigenous category moving back and forth from the ‘deep’ chronology of the sixteenth century to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in insurrections in Mexico (the Zapatistas). Narration and philosophy of history, historiographies, Spanish and Nahuatl, ‘poetics’, go into the messy mix and we have no choice but to continue pushing thinking practices that offer no mirages of easy comfort or consolation, big nouns in the singular form, ‘liberation’ included.
The afterword mentions ‘hopscotch’ after Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela. The suggestion is to mess up the seductions of straight lines. Readers can circulate the pages as they wish, pick bits and pieces, follow any order, compare and contrast portions or sections. They can tie or untie assertions among the six participants – including me. Readers will note the intersections or agreements and the divergences and disagreements. There are silences and dismissals, oblique and veiled and blatant and humorous (the Cuban representative wins the award here). We are tangled up. The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations vindicates foreign entanglements, the more, the better.
What are some three useful or provocative soundbites? Give us three examples, please.
The first is ‘Anglo Zone’. It refers to the ‘ground zero’ of the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a short update for the old-fashioned ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or the ‘ánglico’ (Barcia Trelles). Latinos in the United States use ‘Anglo/s’. It is not only about the use of the lingua franca in the aggressive monolingual style. The interrogation must gather impetus to reach the various geopolitical, university uses and popular-culture levels of engagement. ‘Anglo’ has to do with a certain universe or mental picture that narrows or shrinks the world to recent timespaces, typically the said ‘modernity’ of the late-nineteenth century and twentieth century, a reduced version of the ‘modern’. Duke produced ‘postmodernity’ (Fredric Jameson) and some of that must be rescued (Beverley does that in the conversation with me). ‘Anglo’ allows us to address ugly-face hegemony. It is the PLATO-NATO combination (U.S. supremacy and its largely docile version of Europe inside a frame of Eurocentrism of world dimensions, perhaps thinning out as I write these lines). Hence, the ‘Latin’ parenthetical portion, the ‘im-perfection’ of incompletion and undesirable situations and the emergence of the ‘colonial’ with post/de-colonial projections tie a knot that The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations will cut.
The second is ‘agonies of historicity’ or the compromise of linearity (big cause, teleology, progress). That is, the rubric seeks the affirmation of the struggles to achieve a greater reflexivity towards ‘history’, rather than extinction or death, hence the plurality. It is not easy – it never was – to hold on to the deliberate pursuit of the old meanings of old authors and old texts in the university classrooms today. It is not easy to see into the potential meaningfulness of past experiences and what these may say about our futures. How to go about such ‘crazy tasks’ if one wants to converse with those already dead in a foreign language inside the Anglo Zone that resembles more a hostile environment than a locus amoenus? Yet, I am conversing with five interlocutors who have managed to make a professional living in these endeavours. How did they do it? How does diachronicity hold in their professional pursuits? How do they engage with those authors and scholars ‘gone with the wind’? Music may be a good example: all the great composers in the ‘classical’ tradition bring a universe to the listener. One more contemporary figure in our neighbourhood does not have to speak to us better than others in more distant times and places. The (foreign) humanities must therefore entertain the suspension of ‘progress’. If our contemporaneity is admittedly hurried and disoriented, why shouldn’t ‘we’ look at the past for beauty, intelligence, inspiration, endurance, even consolation? If ‘they’ did the best ‘they’ could, why could not ‘we’ try to do the same? How will the following generations of academic scholars compare with our five protagonists in these ominous times?
Third and last must be the ‘colonial’ marker, and its post/de-colonial, and one can add anti-colonial collaterals. Why bother with the sixteenth century inside a superpower society that is neglectful of what happened yesterday and moves on very quickly to the good futures of supremacy and hegemony or the bad futures of a relative decline? Each conversation partner provides a few answers to the meaning of ‘colonial’. I still think the marker provides a greater complexity and a general discontent with conventionalities, a widening of the lens beyond predictable localities and usual suspects, an intellectual appreciation of the instability to the Spanish–English dyad, a rich bunch of authors, difficult texts, complicated situations and difficult moments that will simply leave us not knowing. The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations is not just about the ‘Latin’, not about ‘America’, and not about ‘perfection’, remember.
You like the triple configuration of level of analysis: ‘high’ culture or geopolitics, middlebrow culture or university life, and popular or mass cultures (or the ‘street’). Please explain.
As much as I always want to defend the ‘humanities’, I have been increasingly unhappy for a while with pure, professional exercises in such shrinking domains. Externalities matter enormously. Therefore, I have stuck my neck out, damaged my heart and soul for interdisciplinarity pursuits in the last two decades. I continue doing so assuming the risks of upsetting tacit conventions and getting those inside and outside those ‘fields’ angry. Come what may: the ‘world’ needs interrogation and it is never big enough. I never wanted to stick to one ‘field’, Latin American or Hispanic literature and culture, say, as it is conventionally understood in the Anglo world of universities, publishers and fashion shows (i.e., United States of America mostly but also the United Kingdom). I always wanted to jump fences surrounding linguistic use, national provenance or disciplinary training. It is problems of history and linguistic use that kick off the interrogations and investigations. Ever since arriving in the United States, I have been cognizant of the connections among international relations furnished by the United States, its Area Studies, its disciplines and subjects of knowledge practice arranged according to nation-state priorities, institutional interests, official taxonomies of value, more or less explicit. My five interlocutors field such concerns in different ways (inequalities loom large historically and professionally, the word ‘racism’ comes up in several occasions). The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations conveys something of a complex picture in toto that must bring forth this triple configuration (geopolitics, higher education, ‘the street’) to any reading of any text by any (foreign) author in any operative Anglo setting. I have tried to convey in my questions an expansive sense of things in the vicinity of a superpower and its national-cultural institutions in higher education surrounded by the ‘soft power’ of its popular culture. I am sure that these dimensions will be all around the readers of these pages in myriad ways. American culture is part of who we say we are and The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations is therefore an infiltration of sorts. I am holding a mirror to Uncle Sam. He is also holding a mirror to ‘us’. As different as they are, Beverley and González Echevarría provide keen insights about these academic and lay intersections in the United States of the last four decades. This book helps us see ourselves better also about what may come in the next decades.